5 ms·

They didn't just go out and build some. The KGB was stealing NASA's plans. NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which

by cronix 4y ago

They didn't just go out and build some. The KGB was stealing NASA's plans. NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which the Soviets copied. Their first Buran only flew once and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles. The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine.[1] Then the USSR collapsed. Currently they are sitting in decaying hangars in Baikonur, just rotting away. There's video on youtube of people sneaking in (it's a guarded base), flying drones around them and climbing around in and out of them. It's pretty cool. [2] [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogue-one-how-the-soviets-stole-nasas-shuttle-plans https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM

SECProto 4y ago
> The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine. This is overselling it. They were aerodynamically very similar, but the shuttle had the SSME (space shuttle main engines, ~250tonnes thrust each) burning from liftoff to orbit, while Buran had only orbital thrusters (9 tonnes thrust)- all the thrust from liftoff through orbit came from the engines on Energia + boosters.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- usrusr 4y ago
  In other words: reusable upper stage vs fully reusable rocket minus the drop tank
  - SECProto 4y ago
    For certain definitions of reusable, yes. Certainly retaining the SSME's for refurbishment was a big accomplishment. I wish Energia+buran could have maintained funding for a few decades - concepts for the flyback boosters were cool and possibly promised to be more quickly/reliably reusable than the space shuttle ended up being.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Today the Shuttle is largely regarded as refurbishable, not reusable. Reusability was the goal, but the SRBs actually cost more to recover and refurbish than to just spin a new casing, and the orbiter was so thoroughly disassembled and inspected after each flight - including disassembling each SSME - that no definition of reusable for any other product would apply. That said, it does seem that at least one of the X-37Bs actually is reusable, in the sense that that it seems to have no major disassembly occur between flights. But it is so closely guarded that we really have only hints, not facts.
adastra22 4y ago
My favorite tidbit about the Buran is that it executes a complicated roll maneuver immediately after lift off. You can see the Shuttle do the exact same thing when it launches from Cape Canaveral. The reason is that the lunch pad at the Cape is orientated particular way because it was an upgraded launch pad from the Saturn V, and they couldn’t just rebuild from scratch to meet Shuttle specs. So it rolls after clearing the launch tower to achieve the correct orientation. The Buran launch pad, by contrast, is able to rotate 360 degrees. They could have just rotated the pad to be correctly aligned before launch. But no, they execute the same complicated, mission-risk-adding roll maneuver verbatim. Exactly like shuttle. I guarantee you the Buran was running stolen launch sequence code from the Shuttle.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV-3ldMvpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV-3ldMvpA Here's the Energiya launch site (a sequence of 360° photos, you can look around). What part of it could rotate, in your opinion? Keep in mind the tower is also missing the massive supports and the cosmonaut escape route, a humongous tube slide that couldn't move anywhere. You might be thinking of the first R-7 launchpads that had to be rotated to a fixed angle before the launch because the control system from 1950's was unable to compute the roll maneuver in flight, aerodynamics being too complex for it.
- turbinerneiter 4y ago
  Where are you taking this info from? Wikipedia makes no mention of that reasoning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roll_program https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roll_program The roll is part of the gravity turn, every craft does that kind of stuff to 'aim'.
- eagerpace 4y ago
  So much wrong here. Seems to be a trend on hn this morning. Food for thought, even if they did steal code, what would that have looked like in the 70s and 80s? Printing out reams of paper? Wheeling in a giant hard disk?
  - 4y ago
asdff 4y ago
The buran did some cool things though. It took off, orbited the earth twice, then landed pretty close to target completely remotely. Apparently it only lost like 8 heat tiles on that flight too. Imagine if the program really got going and they were running automated space shuttle missions while the U.S. was still crudely sending people up. That would have been an even bigger a PR disaster for NASA than the shuttle disasters were already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
- JonathonW 4y ago
  All of Shuttle launch and most of reentry was automated; the landing itself was always done manually but a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle). We "crudely sent people up" with the Shuttle because sending people up with the Shuttle was part of what we wanted to do with the thing. If there had been sufficient demand for fully-unmanned Shuttle missions, it could've been done; the fact that it wasn't means that there were too few such missions that couldn't be better served by other vehicles (that didn't have to worry about carrying around a ton of baggage focused around keeping people alive).
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    > a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle). Actually, the only hardware missing for a fully automated landing was a relay to deploy the landing gear. Later shuttle flights - maybe only one - actually carried a wiring harness that _could_ have been configured to enable remote / automated landing gear deploy. That said, landing the shuttle was a challenge and an achievement. No pilot would give up the opportunity to perform such a prestigious landing. And the shuttle commander was always a pilot.
- iJohnDoe 4y ago
  That is actually impressive. Imagine if Russia kept their sh#t together and continued progressing. They got some things right.
russell_h 4y ago
One of them is actually sitting out in the open and now visible on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.5712292,38.1431209,154m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@55.5712292,38.1431209,154m/data...
dotancohen 4y ago
> and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles This is not true so far as I know. If you have some source documenting heat damage to the orbiter I'd love to see it. I believe that the Buran lost about half a dozen tiles on reentry, contrast with STS-1 which lost more than a dozen. In fact, the maiden launch of Columbia was actually delayed over a year because when transporting the shuttle something like 2000 tiles were lost on the flight - subsonic on the back of a 747.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  Wow that was a good test to run, even if by mistake.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    The 747 flight? Yeah, in retrospect STS-1 was lucky on so many counts. And so were at least half a dozen other shuttle flights. In one incident a missing tile on descend allowed the hot plasma to interact with the airframe. By sheer 1 in 24,300 chance that tile was covering a steel antenna, which melted. Had that been almost any other tile, it would have melted the aluminum airframe. In my opinion, STS-1 was far more dangerous - and lucky - than even Vostok 1. Vostok 1 at least was using a rocket that had a flight history. And no shaky solids. And a proven heat shield. And though both flights had ejection seats, only one was able to launch those seats clear of the rocket exhaust.
borissk 4y ago
The Soviets didn't copy most of the design - actually Buran is a completely different design from the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle had a big tank attached to it at the start, but the main engines where part of the Shuttle. Buran was launched by an Energia rocket (which was planned to eventually be reused like Falcon 9) and the main engines were on the rocket, not on the shuttle. My wife's dad worked at NASA in the 60s, 70s and 80s - he was appointed to be the manager of one of the Apollo missions that was later cancelled. According to him Congress told NASA they'll partially fund the Shuttle program and NASA can ask the Air Force for any extra money required. Air Force involvement ruined the Shuttle, as the military wanted to have options to use the Shuttle for military operations (such as stealing Soviet satellites out of Soviet radar coverage, dropping nuclear bombs from outside any ground defense range and launching the Shuttle from military fields). The other thing that ruined the Shuttle was NASA was not able to make any real improvements to it. The initial design had a lot of shortcomings and there was never enough funding to improve it.
orbital-decay 4y ago
That's just plain wrong. Energiya/Buran was a fundamentally different system from STS, and only had a superficially similar look, as the silhouette was the only copied part to conform with party requirements. For one, the orbiter was a separate autonomous spacecraft with its own fuel tanks and the main engines, not an integral part of the launcher. It used LOX/RP1 - in orbit! - for both RCS and main engines, with larger dV budget as a result. The control system was absolutely different. Etc etc etc. The Buran design process is pretty well documented in general, and a lot was written about it. The original starting OS-120 concept was pretty much a verbatim copy of the layout and high-level decisions of the Shuttle (they didn't have the "NASA plans", they only had a layout and open data), but they a) realized they couldn't make the SRBs as they used liquid fuels for ICBMs and didn't have the production capability for such large diameter solid rockets, and b) their own additional requirements crept in. So the design evolved over time into an entirely different one. >NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which the Soviets copied. Their first Buran only flew once and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles. The heat tiles used a different material, and it didn't burn up, so this makes little sense.
unixhero 4y ago
The buran. That is an awesome spy Vs spy story. Thank you, this made my day.
SergeAx 4y ago
Of course they just copied heat tiles and launched them without any prior testing. This is how things are done in space exploration.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) is more accurate regarding its only and uncrewed flight. Especially interesting is the automatic landing. Oh, and it has something about the tiles, too. Maybe you should discover some other magazines.

by cronix 4y ago

SECProto 4y ago

> The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine. This is overselling it. They were aerodynamically very similar, but the shuttle had the SSME (space shuttle main engines, ~250tonnes thrust each) burning from liftoff to orbit, while Buran had only orbital thrusters (9 tonnes thrust)- all the thrust from liftoff through orbit came from the engines on Energia + boosters.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
usrusr 4y ago
In other words: reusable upper stage vs fully reusable rocket minus the drop tank
- SECProto 4y ago
  For certain definitions of reusable, yes. Certainly retaining the SSME's for refurbishment was a big accomplishment. I wish Energia+buran could have maintained funding for a few decades - concepts for the flyback boosters were cool and possibly promised to be more quickly/reliably reusable than the space shuttle ended up being.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Today the Shuttle is largely regarded as refurbishable, not reusable. Reusability was the goal, but the SRBs actually cost more to recover and refurbish than to just spin a new casing, and the orbiter was so thoroughly disassembled and inspected after each flight - including disassembling each SSME - that no definition of reusable for any other product would apply. That said, it does seem that at least one of the X-37Bs actually is reusable, in the sense that that it seems to have no major disassembly occur between flights. But it is so closely guarded that we really have only hints, not facts.

adastra22 4y ago

My favorite tidbit about the Buran is that it executes a complicated roll maneuver immediately after lift off. You can see the Shuttle do the exact same thing when it launches from Cape Canaveral. The reason is that the lunch pad at the Cape is orientated particular way because it was an upgraded launch pad from the Saturn V, and they couldn’t just rebuild from scratch to meet Shuttle specs. So it rolls after clearing the launch tower to achieve the correct orientation. The Buran launch pad, by contrast, is able to rotate 360 degrees. They could have just rotated the pad to be correctly aligned before launch. But no, they execute the same complicated, mission-risk-adding roll maneuver verbatim. Exactly like shuttle. I guarantee you the Buran was running stolen launch sequence code from the Shuttle.

orbital-decay 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV-3ldMvpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV-3ldMvpA Here's the Energiya launch site (a sequence of 360° photos, you can look around). What part of it could rotate, in your opinion? Keep in mind the tower is also missing the massive supports and the cosmonaut escape route, a humongous tube slide that couldn't move anywhere. You might be thinking of the first R-7 launchpads that had to be rotated to a fixed angle before the launch because the control system from 1950's was unable to compute the roll maneuver in flight, aerodynamics being too complex for it.
turbinerneiter 4y ago
Where are you taking this info from? Wikipedia makes no mention of that reasoning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roll_program https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roll_program The roll is part of the gravity turn, every craft does that kind of stuff to 'aim'.
eagerpace 4y ago
So much wrong here. Seems to be a trend on hn this morning. Food for thought, even if they did steal code, what would that have looked like in the 70s and 80s? Printing out reams of paper? Wheeling in a giant hard disk?
- 4y ago

asdff 4y ago

The buran did some cool things though. It took off, orbited the earth twice, then landed pretty close to target completely remotely. Apparently it only lost like 8 heat tiles on that flight too. Imagine if the program really got going and they were running automated space shuttle missions while the U.S. was still crudely sending people up. That would have been an even bigger a PR disaster for NASA than the shuttle disasters were already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

JonathonW 4y ago
All of Shuttle launch and most of reentry was automated; the landing itself was always done manually but a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle). We "crudely sent people up" with the Shuttle because sending people up with the Shuttle was part of what we wanted to do with the thing. If there had been sufficient demand for fully-unmanned Shuttle missions, it could've been done; the fact that it wasn't means that there were too few such missions that couldn't be better served by other vehicles (that didn't have to worry about carrying around a ton of baggage focused around keeping people alive).
- dotancohen 4y ago
  > a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle). Actually, the only hardware missing for a fully automated landing was a relay to deploy the landing gear. Later shuttle flights - maybe only one - actually carried a wiring harness that _could_ have been configured to enable remote / automated landing gear deploy. That said, landing the shuttle was a challenge and an achievement. No pilot would give up the opportunity to perform such a prestigious landing. And the shuttle commander was always a pilot.
iJohnDoe 4y ago
That is actually impressive. Imagine if Russia kept their sh#t together and continued progressing. They got some things right.

russell_h 4y ago

One of them is actually sitting out in the open and now visible on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.5712292,38.1431209,154m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@55.5712292,38.1431209,154m/data...

dotancohen 4y ago

> and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles This is not true so far as I know. If you have some source documenting heat damage to the orbiter I'd love to see it. I believe that the Buran lost about half a dozen tiles on reentry, contrast with STS-1 which lost more than a dozen. In fact, the maiden launch of Columbia was actually delayed over a year because when transporting the shuttle something like 2000 tiles were lost on the flight - subsonic on the back of a 747.

jessaustin 4y ago
Wow that was a good test to run, even if by mistake.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  The 747 flight? Yeah, in retrospect STS-1 was lucky on so many counts. And so were at least half a dozen other shuttle flights. In one incident a missing tile on descend allowed the hot plasma to interact with the airframe. By sheer 1 in 24,300 chance that tile was covering a steel antenna, which melted. Had that been almost any other tile, it would have melted the aluminum airframe. In my opinion, STS-1 was far more dangerous - and lucky - than even Vostok 1. Vostok 1 at least was using a rocket that had a flight history. And no shaky solids. And a proven heat shield. And though both flights had ejection seats, only one was able to launch those seats clear of the rocket exhaust.

borissk 4y ago

The Soviets didn't copy most of the design - actually Buran is a completely different design from the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle had a big tank attached to it at the start, but the main engines where part of the Shuttle. Buran was launched by an Energia rocket (which was planned to eventually be reused like Falcon 9) and the main engines were on the rocket, not on the shuttle. My wife's dad worked at NASA in the 60s, 70s and 80s - he was appointed to be the manager of one of the Apollo missions that was later cancelled. According to him Congress told NASA they'll partially fund the Shuttle program and NASA can ask the Air Force for any extra money required. Air Force involvement ruined the Shuttle, as the military wanted to have options to use the Shuttle for military operations (such as stealing Soviet satellites out of Soviet radar coverage, dropping nuclear bombs from outside any ground defense range and launching the Shuttle from military fields). The other thing that ruined the Shuttle was NASA was not able to make any real improvements to it. The initial design had a lot of shortcomings and there was never enough funding to improve it.

orbital-decay 4y ago

That's just plain wrong. Energiya/Buran was a fundamentally different system from STS, and only had a superficially similar look, as the silhouette was the only copied part to conform with party requirements. For one, the orbiter was a separate autonomous spacecraft with its own fuel tanks and the main engines, not an integral part of the launcher. It used LOX/RP1 - in orbit! - for both RCS and main engines, with larger dV budget as a result. The control system was absolutely different. Etc etc etc. The Buran design process is pretty well documented in general, and a lot was written about it. The original starting OS-120 concept was pretty much a verbatim copy of the layout and high-level decisions of the Shuttle (they didn't have the "NASA plans", they only had a layout and open data), but they a) realized they couldn't make the SRBs as they used liquid fuels for ICBMs and didn't have the production capability for such large diameter solid rockets, and b) their own additional requirements crept in. So the design evolved over time into an entirely different one. >NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which the Soviets copied. Their first Buran only flew once and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles. The heat tiles used a different material, and it didn't burn up, so this makes little sense.

unixhero 4y ago

The buran. That is an awesome spy Vs spy story. Thank you, this made my day.

SergeAx 4y ago

Of course they just copied heat tiles and launched them without any prior testing. This is how things are done in space exploration.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) is more accurate regarding its only and uncrewed flight. Especially interesting is the automatic landing. Oh, and it has something about the tiles, too. Maybe you should discover some other magazines.